All right ladies & gents, boys & girls, get out your bell bottoms, wedge shoes, your strawberry letters 22, because 3 Chics is gonna tear the roof off the mother …sucka and ring your bells this week with some fun & FUNK and some dope DISCO! Ain’t nothing but a party, y’all!

Parliament-Funkadelic is a funk, soul and rockmusic collective headed by George Clinton. Their style has been dubbed P-Funk. Collectively the group has existed under various names since the 1960s and has been known for top-notch musicianship, politically charged lyrics, outlandish concept albums and memorable live performances. They have a large cult following.[citation needed

The collective’s origins date back to the doo-wop group The Parliaments, formed in the late 1950s in Plainfield, New Jersey. Under Clinton’s direction, by the early 1970s the groups Parliament and Funkadelic were operating concurrently and consisted of the same stable of musicians playing different types of funk music for two different labels. The name “Parliament-Funkadelic” became the catch-all term for the multiple bands in Clinton’s stable.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About SouthernGirl2

A Native Texan who adores baby kittens, loves horses, rodeos, pomegranates, & collect Eagles.
Enjoys politics, games shows, & dancing to all types of music. Loves discussing and learning about different cultures.
A Phi Theta Kappa lifetime member with a passion for Social & Civil Justice.

89 Responses to Monday Open Thread

SOMA, Japan – Radiation is spewing from damaged reactors at a crippled nuclear power plant in tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan in a dramatic escalation of the 4-day-old catastrophe. The prime minister has warned residents to stay inside or risk getting radiation sickness.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Tuesday that a fourth reactor at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex was on fire and that more radiation was released

Prime Minister Naoto Kan warned that there are dangers of more leaks and told people living within 19 miles (30 kilometers) of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex stay indoors.

According to an Associated Press report, House Republicans passed a budget plan that would slash the National Weather Service and the Tsunami Warning Center that issued warnings minutes after Friday’s devastating earthquake.

The warning center provided critical information to public safety officials and residents to prepare effectively and remain safe during the tsunami but Republicans’ reduction could force furloughs and major reductions in the center’s ability to operate effectively.

While slashing the National Weather Service, House Republicans continue to protect taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil companies making record profits. Last week, Republican Homeland Security Chairman Peter King called the budget “dangerous” because it slashes port and transit security upwards of 66 percent.

Background

The House Republican continuing resolution slashed $126 million for the National Weather Service. [HR 1, Vote #147 , 2/19/11; WTHR, 2/24/11]
GOP budget targets agency that warned of tsunami. “A spending plan being pushed by Republicans would slash funding for the agency that warned Hawaii and the West Coast about the devastating tsunami in Japan. The plan, approved by the GOP-controlled House last month, would trigger an estimated $126 million in cuts for the National Weather Service, the agency that houses the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. The center issued widespread warnings minutes after Friday’s earthquake and issued guidance and updates throughout the day.” [AP, 3/11/11]

(CNN) – Prominent New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg says that Sarah Palin just might have a clearer path to the Republican presidential nomination next year than commonly understood – an event he warns would lead to President Obama’s clear reelection.

Gregg, the former senator and governor of the Granite State, says the muddled GOP presidential field means it’s more likely than ever there won’t be a clear consensus candidate before the party’s nominating convention in August of 2012. If that happens, says Gregg, Palin and her army of supporters might have the upper hand when it comes to settling on a presidential candidate.

“A candidate who runs second or third in a great many primaries could go into the convention with a sizable block of delegates,” writes Gregg in an Op-Ed in The Hill newspaper Monday. “Who would this favor? Does Sarah Palin come to mind? Although she is not viewed by most as strong enough to win, she is viewed by many as a person worth voting for to make a statement.”

While it’s unlikely Palin (should she run) would win that many primary contests, placing second or third might be enough – especially this time around when delegates will be awarded a proportionate basis instead of the winner-take-all system that has previously been the rule in Republican primaries.

“Finishing second and third isn’t really a big deal – until you get enough delegates to be the nominee,” writes Gregg. “And picking a nominee who it seems would be easily defeated by President Obama might not be the best statement.”

In 2008, Gregg was a supporter of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is all-but-certain to run again.

CNBC host Larry Kudlow apologized Friday for a startling remark made after the devastating earthquake in Japan.

“The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that,” Kudlow said.

Kudlow tweeted his apology later on Friday:

I did not mean to say human toll in Japan less important than economic toll. Talking about markets. I flubbed the line. Sincere apology.TPM SLIDESHOW: Disaster In Japan: Worst Crisis Since World War II
Kudlow acknowledged on air that the “human toll is a tragedy.”

March 14, 2011 Footage posted online last week by conservative activist James O’Keefe III captured NPR’s chief fundraising official, Ron Schiller, disparaging conservatives and the Tea Party and saying NPR would be better off without federal funding.

Fueled in part by the attention given the video by the conservative Daily Caller website, an 11 1/2-minute version of O’Keefe’s hidden camera video ricocheted around the blogosphere Tuesday.

It mortified NPR, which swiftly repudiated Schiller’s remarks and in short order triggered his ouster along with that of his boss, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, who is no relation to Ron Schiller.

A closer review of those tapes, however, shows that many of Ron Schiller’s most provocative remarks were presented in a misleading way.

‘There Are Two Ways To Lie’

O’Keefe’s tapes show Ron Schiller and his deputy, Betsy Liley, at an upscale cafe in Georgetown for lunch in February. They meet with two men posing as officials with an Islamic trust. The men are actually O’Keefe’s associates — citizen journalists, he calls them.

O’Keefe also posted a two-hour tape that he said was the “largely raw” audio and video from the incident so people can judge the credibility of his work.

The Blaze — a conservative news aggregation site set up by Fox News host Glenn Beck — first took a look late last week and found that O’Keefe had edited much of the shorter video in deceiving ways.

“There was certainly a lot there for conservatives and people of faith and Tea Party activists to be bothered about — but we felt like that wasn’t the whole story,” said Scott Baker, editor in chief of The Blaze. “There were a lot of other things said that may have been complimentary to conservatives and to people of faith and Tea Party activists in the same conversations.”

My review was conducted with several colleagues. I also relied on outside people, including Baker, who have expertise in analyzing video and audio to review the two tapes.

Broadcast journalist Al Tompkins said he was initially outraged by what he heard in that first, shorter video by O’Keefe. Tompkins now teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“What I saw was an executive at NPR expressing overtly political opinions that I was really uncomfortable with,” Tompkins said. “Particularly the way the video was edited, it just seemed he was spouting off about practically everything.”

But Tompkins said his mind was changed by watching that two-hour version.

“I tell my children there are two ways to lie,” Tompkins said. “One is to tell me something that didn’t happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen. I think they employed both techniques in this.”

“From my personal opinion, the short one is definitely edited in a form and fashion to lead you to a certain conclusion — you might say it’s looking only at the dirty laundry,” Menz said. He drew a distinction between that and a compressed news story.

O’Keefe’s ‘Investigative Reporting’

O’Keefe hasn’t replied to several requests for comment for my stories on his tapes. On Twitter last week, he replied to me that his editing was no different from what other journalists do in crafting their stories — including my own.

On Sunday, he told CNN’s Howard Kurtz that his use of hidden cameras is in the finest traditions of muckraking journalism.

“Journalists have been doing this for a long time,” O’Keefe said. “It’s a form of investigative reporting that you use to seek and find the truth.”

O’Keefe said on CNN’s Reliable Sources that his sting was inspired by NPR’s decision to drop longtime news analyst Juan Williams last October after Williams made comments on Fox News about Muslims.

“The tape is very powerful,” O’Keefe said. “The tape is very honest. The tape cuts to the core of who these people are.”

But 26-year-old O’Keefe’s own record is checkered. His takedown of the community organizing group ACORN relied on undercover videos that the California state attorney general’s office concluded significantly distorted what occurred. Last May, O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor after an attempted video sting at the offices of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA).

‘A Big Warning Flag’

In the review of the NPR tapes, O’Keefe’s edited video triggered criticism right from his introduction. He ominously describes the phony Islamic group, saying that its website “said the organization sought to spread the acceptance of sharia across the world.” (Shariah is Islamic law based on the Quran, although there are wide disparities in how different Muslim sects and cultures interpret what that entails.)

On the tape, Ron Schiller is then shown and heard creased with laughter, saying, “Really, that’s what they said?”

In reality, as the longer tape shows, that laughter follows an innocuous exchange as Schiller and Liley greet the two supposed donors at their table.

“That to us was a signal that they were trying to condition the person watching the piece to feel as though there was assent to these ideas,” said Scott Baker of The Blaze. “That was a big warning flag.”

Tompkins said O’Keefe sought to portray the fundraisers as though they would do anything to appease donors.

On the shorter tape, for instance, one of the fake donors is heard assailing a “Zionist” influence on the media — and Liley, NPR’s senior director of institutional giving, is heard responding affirmingly.

The O’Keefe associate posing as potential donor Ibrahim Kassam says NPR is “one of the few places that has the courage to present it [fairly]. There’s kind of a joke that we used to call it National Palestinian Radio.”

Some laughter follows. But the shorter tape does not include Ron Schiller immediately telling the two men that donors cannot expect to influence news coverage.

“There is such a big firewall between funding and reporting: Reporters will not be swayed in any way, shape or form,” Schiller says on that longer tape, in one of several such remarks.

Tompkins found that meaningful, noting that Ron Schiller was a fundraiser, not an official affecting the newsroom.

“The message that he said most often — I counted six times: He told these two people that he had never met before that you cannot buy coverage,” Tompkins said. “He says it over and over and over again.”

Confusing The Context

In addition, several times the donors seek to goad Schiller and Liley into making inflammatory statements about conservatives or Fox News personalities, and they deflect them. At one point, Liley explains that she attended Purdue University, which she describes as a conservative and respected research university, and that people there relied on Fox to get much of their news.

Menz, the digital forensics consultant, said he found some of Schiller’s actual remarks disturbing. But by analyzing time stamps, Menz concluded that many of Schiller’s remarks in that shorter video are presented out of sequence from the questions that were posed.

“For me, in my background, it immediately puts things into question,” Menz said. “You really don’t know what context these were in, what was going on in the 20 minutes before and after this question was asked.”

Take the political remarks. Ron Schiller speaks of growing up as a Republican and admiring the party’s fiscal conservatism. He says Republican politicians and evangelicals are becoming “fanatically” involved in people’s lives.

But in the shorter tape, Schiller is also presented as saying the GOP has been “hijacked” by Tea Partyers and xenophobes.

In the longer tape, it’s evident Schiller is not giving his own views but instead quoting two influential Republicans — one an ambassador, another a senior Republican donor. Schiller notably does not take issue with their conclusions — but they are not his own.

Fueling The Public Broadcasting Funding Debate

Upon their release last week, O’Keefe’s videos gave fresh life to the push by Congressional Republicans to strip federal funding for public broadcasting. In the shorter video, Schiller appears to be saying that NPR would do just fine without federal dollars, though some stations would go dark. On the longer tape, it’s clear Schiller says it would be disastrous in the short term.

Tompkins said O’Keefe’s editing is repeatedly and blatantly unfair.

“Except for a couple of unfortunate forays for political opinion, I think that Ron Schiller actually did a fairly remarkably good job of explaining how NPR works and what you can and cannot expect if you contribute money to the NPR Foundation,” Tompkins said.

Blaze editor Baker said he emerged from analyzing the tapes with a surprising degree of respect for the professionalism of the two NPR executives, Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley.

“I think if you look at two hours in total, you largely get an impression that these are pretty — they seem to be fairly balanced people, trying to do a fairly good job,” Baker said.

In recent days, several influential journalists have written that they regret giving O’Keefe’s NPR videos wider circulation without scrutinizing them for themselves, given his past record and some of the objections that the Blaze first raised. They include Ben Smith of Politico, James Poniewozik of Time magazine and Dave Weigel of Slate.

“The speed at which the media operates when a video comes out is a problem,” Weigel said Sunday. “I mean, the rush to be the first to report on a video — and, let’s be brutally honest, the rush is to get traffic and to get people booked on [cable TV] shows to talk about it — and that nature leads you to not do the rigor and fact-checking that you would do in other situations.”

An Accelerated Departure

Late Sunday night, NPR Senior Vice President Dana Davis Rehm wrote in an e-mail that the videos unfairly present several innocent comments by Ron Schiller and Liley as inappropriate.

“No one should be surprised based on O’Keefe’s record that the video was heavily edited with the intention of discrediting NPR,” Rehm said.

But from the outset, Rehm wrote, NPR confirmed that “egregious comments were made that were not distorted, doctored or fundamentally misrepresented.”

Ron Schiller had already announced in early March that he would be leaving NPR for a job at the Aspen Institute in his hometown in Colorado. He had been commuting across the country, at his own expense, since joining NPR 18 months ago. But in the wake of the backlash to the videos, his departure was accelerated to take effect immediately. And then the Aspen Institute announced Schiller would not be joining its ranks. Liley has been placed on administrative leave.

UPDATE: Fox News officially announced on Monday afternoon that former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh is becoming a contributor to the network.

Michael Clemente, the network’s senior vice president for news, announced the move in a statement. He said that “Senator Bayh’s decades of experience in the political arena and his participation in key decisions in Washington will lend a valuable point of view to the entire Fox News lineup.”

“I’m pleased to offer analysis of public policy and politics to the millions of Americans who get their news from Fox,” Bayh said in the statement.

Little bee itch sold out! A turncoat mofo!

Bayh is jealous of President Obama, so now he’ll try to help Fox derail his Presidency. Punk ass bee itch!

By MIKE ZAPLER | 3/14/11 1:43 PM EDT
AUSTIN, Texas — Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are “hoping to destroy” the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.

“I came here to warn you, the party may be over,” Franken said. “They’re coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”

Net neutrality, he added, is “the First Amendment issue of our time.”

Receiving a hero’s welcome from the liberal crowd, Franken took repeated shots at big telecoms, singling out Comcast.

He said Comcast is looking to change the basic architecture of the Web by implementing a pricing scheme that allows moneyed interests to pay for faster speeds, leaving everyone else behind. That would be a particularly bad development for the independent musicians and artists gathered here, he said.

“The real end for Comcast is to put Netflix out of business entirely,” Franken said, because of the threat that Netflix’s streaming video business could pose to Comcast’s cable franchise. “In the end, the American people will end up paying a lot more for worse service.”

Comcast is now embroiled in a dispute with Level 3, a networking company that carries online video feeds for Netflix, over fees Comcast wants to charge to carry the high-bandwidth content.

In response to Franken’s comments, a Comcast spokeswoman said Monday that the dispute with Level 3 isn’t about net neutrality but is “a peering issue.” “Under the FCC order for the Comcast NBCU transaction, Comcast is required to comply with the FCC’s recent open Internet rules even if they are overturned in court. Our customers can access all Netflix content,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, Comcast’s vice president of government communications.

Franken, who was an aggressive opponent of the Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal, implored SXSW attendees to fight the political influence of the big telecom firms.

“Unfortunately one thing these big corporations have that we don’t is the ability to purchase favorable political outcomes,” he said. “Big telecoms have lots of [lobbyists], and good ones, too. … The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these corporate giants.”

Franken said talk of a “government takeover” of the Internet by net neutrality critics has as much credibility as claims of “death panels” in the health care legislation and claims that “Obama’s a Muslim,” calling them a “pantheon of lies.”

Franken finished up his half-hour speech by imploring the crowd to preserve net neutrality to avoid a future in which they’re “stuck listening to the Black Eyed Peas and reminiscing about the days before you had to sell out to make it.”

This: “Unfortunately one thing these big corporations have that we don’t is the ability to purchase favorable political outcomes,” he said. “Big telecoms have lots of [lobbyists], and good ones, too. … The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these corporate giants.”

Conyers: Obama Would Be In Trouble If The 2012 GOP Field Wasn’t So Weak

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), a stalwart of the House’s progressive wing and the self-proclaimed Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, told reporters Monday that President Obama should be thanking his lucky stars the Republicans can’t seem to rustle up someone credible to take him on.

Pointing to the numerous ways Obama has disappointed his wing of the Democratic party since taking office, Conyers suggested Obama might have a hard time of it in 2012 if the Republicans came up with someone suitable.

“I’m sure he realized what he was getting into,” Conyers said of Obama, reflecting on his term in office. “He tried to close Guantanamo, he was against tax cuts for the wealthy — we keep having a longer and longer list of things that he wanted to do, wished he could do more about and of course is having a big problem.”

Conyers also lamented the White House talk of increased offshore oil drilling and general discussions of the environment.” In general, he criticized Obama for “all these concessions with the people that are going to oppose him.”

“The only thing that saves him, of course, is that there doesn’t seem to be anybody to run against him next year,” Conyers said before launching into a bit of free-association on the potential 2012 GOP field so far:

You could count Sarah Palin, my favorite undisclosed candidate. Or Michele Bachmann. Newt Gingrich has been reinvented for the third time. And Romney…He didn’t finish the thought about Romney.

“It’s not the greatest list to choose from as we go into the next election,” Conyers concluded.

Conyers had plenty praise for Obama, too, lauding the president’s weekend op-ed about gun control in the Arizona Daily Star and promising to appropriate the phrase “Obamacare” from Republicans who have used it to define all that they detest in the health care reform law of last year.

Conyers spoke to reporters at the National Press Club in Washington Monday. Asked by a reporter about his harsh words for the president, Conyers said he still stands with Obama. But mostly because he has no other choice.

“The alternative is unthinkable,” he said. “I just want to make him a better president. I was doing this before he was.”

“Of course I support him,” Conyers concluded. “I just want him to do more.”

Monica Conyers Goes To Jail
The corrupt Detroit lawmaker who took cash bribes in fast-food parking lots will report to prison today after a federal appeals court rejected her desperate effort to avoid serving time for crimes she pleaded guilty to but subsequently denied committing.

Disgraced Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, wife of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, will spend the next three years incarcerated (if you can even call it that) at a West Virginia federal detention center appropriately nicknamed Camp Cupcake. Located along a river in the scenic foothills, the facility resembles a college campus and has hosted famous inmates such as Martha Stewart.

Monday, March 14, 2011
The Temperament Of Obama
14 Mar 2011 01:30 pm Mark Steyn is as profound as ever:
I don’t mind the union bruisers, Marxist social engineers and lockstep zombies of the Democrat identity-group plantations voting for Obama: They knew what they wanted, and they got it. But I find it harder to understand the preening metrosexual nincompoop ObamaCons besotted with fantasies about his “temperament” (mentioning no names). His “temperament” would seem to be one of his more obvious failings.

Really? As usual in a Steyn piece, there is no actual evidence to back up his series of one-liners masquerading as something more than sophomoric Goldbergism. For me, temperament means not running around like chicken littles with their heads cut off as soon as a revolt in Libya is losing to Qaddafi (see Kristol, Wieseltier, Wolfowitz, et al.). As a proud Obamacon, I backed him for positive and negative reasons. On temperament, who could possibly argue that Obama is less level-headed than the crackpot McCain, who picked Palin has his Number 2 after 40 hours of Googling for p.c. reasons, would have started two more wars by now, if he’d had his druthers (in Libya and Georgia, the latter just for anti-Russian kicks), claimed to know little about economics in a historic crisis.

Yes, the crack about it being easier running China was enough to provoke Steyn into a “liberal fascism” tirade. He forgets the moment when Bush said exactly the same thing, something that must have occurred to every president occasionally stalled and frustrated by our constitutional restraints (except, of course, when Bush did actually act like a dictator, unilaterally re-writing laws into gibberish, claiming total power in a war without end, torturing prisoners, and when Reagan simply circumvented the law in Iran-Contra). Still my favorite part of the post is the following comment to it, an almost textbook example of the Church Of The Right, that now passes for a political party:
I see that liberal trolls are already making allusions to President Bush’s joking remark about dictatorships from ten years ago.

That was totally different. President Bush was a good and decent man who, whatever his faults, loved our Constitution, our country, and our troops. Obama, by contrast, is the focus of evil in the modern world. He openly despises the Constitution, openly loathes America, and actively tries to hurt our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines at every opportunity.

Dana Perino: ‘This White House, Of All White Houses’ Should Not Make Fun Of John Boehner’s ‘Skin Color’
Mark Joyella | 10:37 am, March 14th, 2011

Former White House press secretary Dana Perino thinks President Obama really needs to give us all a break with the John Boehner tan jokes. On Fox and Friends Monday morning, Perino joined the hosts for a chat about POTUS’ weekend remarks at the Gridiron Club Dinner, where he said of Boehner, “I’ve made a few jokes over the years about John’s unusual coloring. I used to think that it was a tan. But after seeing how often he tears up, I’ve come to realize: that’s not a tan, that’s rust.”

Perino found the line humorless, and even mockingly said “hardy har har” on television to emphasize her point. She also suggested that the president and his joke writers should know better than to–apparently–make jokes about skin color:

They keep going back to the same well and making fun of John Boehner’s skin color? Really? This White House of all White Houses?

Let FOX keeping jumping into the same WELL. Jump deeper, and folks will start digging into the reasons for why the Boner keeps his skin ORANGE. Maybe they need to dig into this family tree and trace his colorings….. Maybe papa or grandpappy couldn’t keep their hands off a sista?

Republicans introduce legislation in the House and Senate to make English the official language of the U.S.

Republicans in both the House and Senate have introduced legislation that would declare English the official language of the United States and require the development of English language testing guidelines for those applying for U.S. citizenship.

The English Language Unity Act would set out a new chapter in U.S. code that imposes an obligation on U.S. officials to “preserve and enhance the role of English as the official language of the Federal Government.”

If you look at everything the GOP is doing through the lens of a bunch of scared old, white people clinging to the past and terrified of change and brown people, their actions the last decade actually make sense.

If you share Washington’s conventional wisdom that Palin cannot be the GOP nominee, then these panicked Villagers might help you think again. This is their Dr Frankenstein moment. George Will:

“There’s no Reagan without Goldwater, no Goldwater without National Review and no National Review without Buckley — and the contrast between he and Ms. Palin is obvious.”

Krauthammer is more cautious – presumably in case she becomes the nominee (or else he’s frightened of being called “hoity-toity again, which I, er suspect). Wehner, Mac Donald, Labash do not, however, represent the GOP intellectual mainstream. I respect all three, along with Will, for their growing forthrightness and willingness to challenge their own side. But they hold little power. Those who do – Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck – are notably absent from this list. It’s a start though, and Labash unleashes a corker:

“The downside is her gameness to do just about anything — including co-starring with Kate Gosselin on a dopey reality show. And when she does such things, and is inevitably attacked for it, that’s when you see Palinism really fall down as a political approach, as the cocked-fist self-pity and whining set in.”

Pete Wehner gets it almost right:
“She strikes me as a lot more Agnew than Reagan.”

No, it’s Nixon, with all the resentment and deception, and none of the intelligence. No wonder some are panicking. But they created and supported her when it counted.

It’s been more than two months since the tragedy in Tucson stunned the nation. It was a moment when we came together as one people to mourn and to pray for those we lost. And in the attack’s turbulent wake, Americans by and large rightly refrained from finger-pointing, assigning blame or playing politics with other people’s pain.

But one clear and terrible fact remains. A man our Army rejected as unfit for service; a man one of our colleges deemed too unstable for studies; a man apparently bent on violence, was able to walk into a store and buy a gun.

He used it to murder six people and wound 13 others. And if not for the heroism of bystanders and a brilliant surgical team, it would have been far worse.

But since that day, we have lost perhaps another 2,000 members of our American family to gun violence. Thousands more have been wounded. We lose the same number of young people to guns every day and a half as we did at Columbine, and every four days as we did at Virginia Tech.

Every single day, America is robbed of more futures. It has awful consequences for our society. And as a society, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to put a stop to it.

Now, like the majority of Americans, I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. And the courts have settled that as the law of the land. In this country, we have a strong tradition of gun ownership that’s handed from generation to generation. Hunting and shooting are part of our national heritage. And, in fact, my administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners – it has expanded them, including allowing people to carry their guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.

The fact is, almost all gun owners in America are highly responsible. They’re our friends and neighbors. They buy their guns legally and use them safely, whether for hunting or target shooting, collection or protection. And that’s something that gun-safety advocates need to accept. Likewise, advocates for gun owners should accept the awful reality that gun violence affects Americans everywhere, whether on the streets of Chicago or at a supermarket in Tucson.

I know that every time we try to talk about guns, it can reinforce stark divides. People shout at one another, which makes it impossible to listen. We mire ourselves in stalemate, which makes it impossible to get to where we need to go as a country.

However, I believe that if common sense prevails, we can get beyond wedge issues and stale political debates to find a sensible, intelligent way to make the United States of America a safer, stronger place.

I’m willing to bet that responsible, law-abiding gun owners agree that we should be able to keep an irresponsible, law-breaking few – dangerous criminals and fugitives, for example – from getting their hands on a gun in the first place.

I’m willing to bet they don’t think that using a gun and using common sense are incompatible ideas – that we should check someone’s criminal record before he can check out at a gun seller; that an unbalanced man shouldn’t be able to buy a gun so easily; that there’s room for us to have reasonable laws that uphold liberty, ensure citizen safety and are fully compatible with a robust Second Amendment.

That’s why our focus right now should be on sound and effective steps that will actually keep those irresponsible, law-breaking few from getting their hands on a gun in the first place.

• First, we should begin by enforcing laws that are already on the books. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System is the filter that’s supposed to stop the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun. Bipartisan legislation four years ago was supposed to strengthen this system, but it hasn’t been properly implemented. It relies on data supplied by states – but that data is often incomplete and inadequate. We must do better.

• Second, we should in fact reward the states that provide the best data – and therefore do the most to protect our citizens.

• Third, we should make the system faster and nimbler. We should provide an instant, accurate, comprehensive and consistent system for background checks to sellers who want to do the right thing, and make sure that criminals can’t escape it.

Porous background checks are bad for police officers, for law-abiding citizens and for the sellers themselves. If we’re serious about keeping guns away from someone who’s made up his mind to kill, then we can’t allow a situation where a responsible seller denies him a weapon at one store, but he effortlessly buys the same gun someplace else.

Clearly, there’s more we can do to prevent gun violence. But I want this to at least be the beginning of a new discussion on how we can keep America safe for all our people.

I know some aren’t interested in participating. Some will say that anything short of the most sweeping anti-gun legislation is a capitulation to the gun lobby. Others will predictably cast any discussion as the opening salvo in a wild-eyed scheme to take away everybody’s guns. And such hyperbole will become the fodder for overheated fundraising letters.

But I have more faith in the American people than that. Most gun-control advocates know that most gun owners are responsible citizens. Most gun owners know that the word “commonsense” isn’t a code word for “confiscation.” And none of us should be willing to remain passive in the face of violence or resigned to watching helplessly as another rampage unfolds on television.

As long as those whose lives are shattered by gun violence don’t get to look away and move on, neither can we.

We owe the victims of the tragedy in Tucson and the countless unheralded tragedies each year nothing less than our best efforts – to seek consensus, to prevent future bloodshed, to forge a nation worthy of our children’s futures.

Milwaukee Labor Leader: Union To ‘Redirect’ Efforts To Recalls — And No Talk Of Strikes

\
A public employee union leader in Wisconsin has declared that organized labor will dedicate its efforts to recalling state Senate Republicans this year, and recalling Gov. Walker next year, in response to Walker’s newly-passed bill curtailing public employee unions. He says they are not talking about strikes.

Rich Abelson, executive director of AFSCME Council 48 in Milwaukee, appeared Friday on the local public affairs show UpFront with Mike Gousha, with guest host Kent Wainscott.

“Obviously this was a very disappointing loss for us, with regards to the collective bargaining changes that were made. However, it’s not the end of our fight,” said Abelson. “We have — we’re a union. What we do is we represent workers at the workplace, give them a voice, and we will continue to do so. It is our mission, it is what we believe, it is who we are.

“And now it’s time to redirect those efforts, it is time to take back the Wisconsin Senate. We are very much engaged in the recall efforts that are taking place with the eight Republican senators. We think a significant number of those are gonna be successful recalls, we think by summer we will have changed the face of the Wisconsin Senate.”

Abelson acknowledged that rolling back the law would be “a much longer term struggle” than just winning the state Senate for the Democrats, as Republicans would still control the Assembly and the governor’s mansion.

“But again, I want to just make this very clear. If the intent was by Governor Walker and his fellow De– Republicans, excuse me, in the legislature, to destroy the union movement in the public sector in WIsconsin, it’s going to fail,” he said. “We are going to change, and we are going to adapt, and we will continue to do what we do, and that is represent people in the workplace. And if the bargaining table is taken away from us, we will replace that with much more political and legislative activity.”

Wainscott asked Abelson whether one particular activity could be undertaken by public unions: strikes.

“No. I mean, look, public sector workers in Wisconsin are committed and dedicated to the citizens we serve,” said Abelson. “And there has been no talk of a general strike, there has been no talk of targeted strikes, or job actions or anything else. Our dispute is not with our employers. Our dispute is with the Republicans in the Wisconsin Senate, the Republicans in the Wisconsin Assembly, and Governor Walker.”

He later added: “We think this energy and the dedication that people are showing now is gonna continue into next year, and we think that it is a very strong likelihood, as difficult as it is, that we will be successful in recalling Governor Walker next year.”

SOMA, Japan — The second hydrogen explosion in three days rocked a Japanese nuclear plant Monday, sending a massive cloud of smoke into the air and injuring 11 workers. The blast was felt 25 miles (40 kilometers) away, but the plant’s operator said the radiation levels at the affected unit were still within legal limits.

Sarah Palin’s infamous “blood libel” video reacting to the Arizona shooting caused no small amount of controversy. Now, New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reports that Palin was even warned against making the video by Fox News CEO Roger Ailes–and that her decision to do so anyway has left a rift between the two.

Palin’s video came days after the shooting, during a time when people had wondered why she had made no extended public statement about the tragedy and when some were citing her “crosshairs” map as an example of extreme political imagery that was contributing to a violent national climate. Palin was reacting to the latter when she accused journalists of “manufacturing a blood libel” by, in her view, charging her as complicit in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

According to Sherman, though, Palin called Ailes before making the video. She complained that the media were blaming her for the shooting, and expressed a desire to respond to her critics. Ailes said that would be a bad idea.

“Lie low,” he said. “There’s no need to inject yourself into the story.” Sherman writes that Palin said her lawyer and other confidantes had given her the same advice. Of course, she didn’t follow that advice, and made the video. Ailes was not happy.

Herman Cain: ‘Don’t Condemn Me Because First Black President Was Bad’
Potential presidential candidate Herman Cain reportedly spoke out on the issue of race during a recent stop in the early primary state of New Hampshire.

According to the Union Leader, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza said he believes that the country electing Barack Obama as its first African-American president could help his chances if he runs for the White House. The Granite State-based outlet relays what Cain had to say on the matter in an interview:

“Now people are over this first black President thing,” he said. “But there are some people who will say, ‘I’m not going to vote for another black guy because this one didn’t work out.’

“And my response is, ‘Well, what about those 43 white guys you put in there? How did they work out?’

“Don’t condemn me because the first black one was bad,” Cain said with a smile.

Politico reported last Friday on additional comments Cain made during his trip to a group of New Hampshire Republicans about some within the African-American community taking issue with the nature of his views:

Cain said a man who self-identified as an African American called into his radio show and said, “I can’t believe you are sitting there praising our founding fathers. They had slaves. How can you talk so admirably of them?”

Cain’s answer paid tribute to America’s founders.

“They set the bar high when they said all men were created equal,” Cain said. “They could have set it where they were that day. They set it high so this national could work up to that ideal.”

Potential presidential candidate Herman Cain reportedly spoke out on the issue of race during a recent stop in the early primary state of New Hampshire.

According to the Union Leader, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza said he believes that the country electing Barack Obama as its first African-American president could help his chances if he runs for the White House. The Granite State-based outlet relays what Cain had to say on the matter in an interview:

“Now people are over this first black President thing,” he said. “But there are some people who will say, ‘I’m not going to vote for another black guy because this one didn’t work out.’

“And my response is, ‘Well, what about those 43 white guys you put in there? How did they work out?’

“Don’t condemn me because the first black one was bad,” Cain said with a smile.

Politico reported last Friday on additional comments Cain made during his trip to a group of New Hampshire Republicans about some within the African-American community taking issue with the nature of his views:

Cain said a man who self-identified as an African American called into his radio show and said, “I can’t believe you are sitting there praising our founding fathers. They had slaves. How can you talk so admirably of them?”

Cain’s answer paid tribute to America’s founders.

“They set the bar high when they said all men were created equal,” Cain said. “They could have set it where they were that day. They set it high so this national could work up to that ideal.”

Story continues below Advertisement

Cain has already launched a presidential exploratory committee and appears to be making headway in his endeavor to connect with conservative voters. While perhaps not as well known as some other possible GOP contenders, it seems his star may be on the rise on the right side of the aisle. He fired up the crowd at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference and shortly after came out on top in a Tea Party straw poll taken at a national summit in Arizona.

The AP recently reported on Cain’s background and presidential ambitions:

Apart from a failed 2004 run for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, Cain hasn’t sought election to public office. Instead, he held a series of high-profile business positions that culminated with part ownership of the Godfather’s Pizza restaurants. He left the company in 1996 and among other positions has worked as host of a radio program in Atlanta, where he espoused his views against abortion and in support of a strong national defense, a smaller government and a return to the gold standard. … Cain said his business success has left him wealthy, but not at a level where he could self-finance a campaign. Cain said he’s eager to travel through Iowa and other early-nominating states, meeting one-on-one with voters.

The Leader reports that in addressing the financial aspect of running a competitive presidential campaign, Cain quipped, “My middle name is not Meg Whitman or Mitt Romney.”

He told the local outlet that if he does follow through in mounting a campaign, he’ll rely on his business credentials and radio talk show host experience to advance his operation.

“If you have the right messenger and the right message, you don’t have to have a whole lot of money, he said.

Republicans Escalate Debt Ceiling Fight
Senate Republican leaders in recent days have escalated a showdown that has been lurking in the background of the more immediate fight over funding the federal government through September. While the funding issue remains unresolved, Congress will soon have to turn its attention to the need to raise the national debt limit, or the country will default in just a few weeks.

“There are 53 Democrats and 47 Republicans. My prediction is not a single one of the 47 Republicans will vote to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes with it some credible effort to do something about our debt,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Fox News Sunday. “I think to get any of the 47 Republicans, you’ve got to do something credible -that the markets believe is credible, that the American people believe is credible, that foreign countries believe is credible — in addition to raising the debt ceiling.”

One of McConnell’s top lieutenant’s, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), was more direct about this. On Twitter, he wrote “[d]ebt ceiling vote is ultimate leverage to get fiscal reform.”

This stands in contrast to comments from House Republican leaders and other influential conservatives over recent weeks and months, all of whom have said failure to raise the debt limit would be calamitous.

In January, for instance, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said “that would be a financial disaster, not only for us, but for the worldwide economy.”

But Boehner controls a large majority in the House, where the minority’s rights are limited, and he can presumably pair a debt limit hike with serious spending and entitlement cuts if he wants to.

The Democrats, by contrast, control a small majority in the Senate, where because of filibuster rules, passing a debt limit hike will probably require 60 votes. And if that’s the case, McConnell and Cornyn are saying they’ll block passage unless it’s paired with “fiscal reform,” which in Republicanese means cuts to entitlements.

McConnell offered only one caveat. “I don’t believe Senate Republicans won’t vote to raise the debt ceiling,” he said. “Now Democrats can raise it themselves if they choose to and try to do nothing whatsoever about the problem.”

This suggests the possibility that Republicans will let Democrats try to pass a debt limit hike and then hang the vote on their shoulders like an albatross. But that plan — if that’s the plan — would run into two problems. First, it would require all Senate Republicans to agree not to filibuster, which is unlikely in the Jim DeMint/Rand Paul Senate. And then, of course, it would have to pass the House, where Democrats can’t pass anything without substantial Republican support. So Occam’s Razor suggests we’re about to reach an impasse.

March 13, 2011 11:55 AM
Cokie Roberts Plays the ‘Both Sides Do It’ Game
By Heather

get really tired of the kind of false equivalency game being played by Cokie Roberts here. It’s one we see constantly by our Villagers in the media who are always desperate to paint the liberal base of the Democratic party as being “extremists.” Republicans are pushing for horrible draconian cuts to the budget that are going to weaken our economy, which Roberts admits is overreaching and it’s going to potentially harm them politically, but then she just has to get the “both sides do it” line in there.

Sorry Cokie but one side governing like Republican-lite and catering to big business but actually caring about governing is not equal to the other side which just wants to burn the house down. She pretty well makes that point herself since she doesn’t cite a single example of this supposed overreach by the Democrats. The only ones she gives are examples of what the Republicans have done.

And I don’t know of anyone who cares whether politicians are “getting along” or not, if “getting along” means doing harm to the working class. It seems the only bipartisanship we’ve been getting out of Washington DC lately is the kind that helps the rich at the expense of the poor and what’s left of our middle class.

Transcript via ABC News.

TAPPER: And Jon makes a salient point in that amusing spot, which is that most of the budget is not being debated right now, George.

WILL: It’s not being debated because they say we’re only going to debate discretionary spending. We should…

ROBERTS: Domestic discretionary spending.

WILL: We should ban that word. It’s all discretionary, other than interest on the national debt. Social Security is discretionary. We have the discretion to change the law. Same is true with Medicare and Medicaid.

ROBERTS: But — but — the — you know, they don’t, because they’re scared to. And what it requires is everybody holding hands and jumping at once. And there’s not a lot of hand-holding and Kumbaya singing on Capitol Hill, so I don’t think that you’re going to see that happening. But this fight I do think is going to be very interesting to see how it works out for Republicans next year.

TAPPER: You think there might be overreaching?

ROBERTS: Absolutely. And it happens with both parties. They do it all the time. They come into power and they think the voters have told them something different from what the voters have actually told them.

alin vs Ailes
13 Mar 2011 09:45 pm She refused to listen to him and lie low after the Tucson shooting. Going rogue on Ailes is usually not good career advice in the right-wing media-industrial complex:

Fox executives have been discussing when they need a definite answer from Palin on her presidential intentions. Fox is hosting the first GOP debate on May 5 in South Carolina. If Palin participates in the debate, then her Fox contract will be suspended. Given her media exposure and grassroots operation, Palin might like to delay a decision until the fall, or later. Whether Fox will tolerate that is another matter.

It’s Palin’s way or the HIGHWAY. Palin will continue trashing the lower 48, until she’s milked it for all she can get
Hit the HIGHWAY, LOSER!
DO let the yellow lines in the road hit you where the good lord splitcha!

Deadbeat Carl Paladino Won’t Pay His Debts
It’s been a while since we last heard news about Carl Paladino — Buffalo’s millionaire slumlord-turned failed New York gubernatorial candidate. Well, the Buffalo News has an update on our favorite Tea Partier from the north! Crazy Carl has decided that he doesn’t need to pay the campaign staffers, consultants and vendors who helped him run against Andrew Cuomo. According to ex-staffers interviewed by the paper, Paladino still owes out about $130,000 in various fees and salaries.

According to ex-staffer Tim Suereth:

“I would have expected a nice thank-you from Carl for all the hard work I had contributed, but instead I got screwed,” said Tim Suereth, who first served as manager of internal operations and later as an unpaid volunteer.

While the campaign paid him $31,912 in salary, the millionaire businessman through direct correspondence has refused to reimburse him for $6,300 in expenses, Suereth said.

And the (quite legitimate) gripes go on and on in the story. That’s bad form, Carl. Don’t blame former staffers for your epic defeat, blame all of the crazy shit you said during the campaign. Maybe?

Who would lead the Democratic National Committee?
Monday, March 14, 2011; 7:42 AM

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine continues to mull over the possibility of running for Senate in Virginia, with many party observers suggesting that he is 50-50 (or slightly more) on entering the race.

If Kaine runs for the seat being vacated by fellow Democrat Jim Webb, President Obama will be charged with picking a new man (or woman) to run the DNC – one of the most public faces of the party on the verge of the 2012 election.

The committee has already undergone something of an overhaul – with former White House political director Patrick Gaspard taking over as executive director after Jen O’Malley Dillon’s departure to the Obama reelection campaign-in-waiting in Chicago – but a new chairman would be the most major change.

Although Kaine hasn’t left the job (yet), a short list of potential replacements is already bouncing around the highest levels of Democratic politics. The list is a combination of longtime Obama loyalists and converts, current officeholders, and those who have recently left office either voluntarily or, well, not.

Here’s a look at the serious contenders (listed alphabetically):

1. Dick Durbin: Perhaps the president’s closest ally in the Senate, Durbin has proved himself to be an able – and on-message – communicator on television. The Illinois Democrat, who would keep his day job, would also be able to look out for the president’s interests in the day-to-day goings-on in the Senate and ensure solid relations between that chamber and the White House.

What if we’re not broke?
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Sunday, March 13, 7:49 PM
“We’re broke.”

You can practically break a search engine if you start looking around the Internet for those words. They’re used repeatedly with reference to our local, state and federal governments, almost always to make a case for slashing programs — and, lately, to go after public-employee unions. The phrase is designed to create a sense of crisis that justifies rapid and radical actions before citizens have a chance to debate the consequences.

Just one problem: We’re not broke. Yes, nearly all levels of government face fiscal problems because of the economic downturn. But there is no crisis. There are many different paths open to fixing public budgets. And we will come up with wiser and more sustainable solutions if we approach fiscal problems calmly, realizing that we’re still a very rich country and that the wealthiest among us are doing exceptionally well.

Consider two of the most prominent we’re-brokers, House Speaker John Boehner and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

“We’re broke, broke going on bankrupt,” Boehner said in a Feb. 28 Nashville speech. For Boehner, this “fact” justifies the $61 billion in domestic spending cuts House Republicans passed (cuts that would have a negligible impact on the long-term deficit). Boehner’s GOP colleagues want reductions in Head Start, student loans and scores of other programs voters like, and the only way to sell them is to cry catastrophe.

Black Girls Rock!

Flickr Photos

Potus Takes Oath of Office

Flotus & Daughters at Great Wall of China

My Brothers Keeper

AFRO PUFFS

Most Adorable Shoe Stealer

Six Little Babies

Fatherhood

Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.